ABSTRACT
The cognitive psychology perspective is concerned with how we think and mentally represent information. This chapter takes an in-depth look at incongruity-resolution theory and describes humor research in the areas of attention, memory, language, and thinking. Humor processing involves the detection of incongruity among activated schemas and a resolution that evokes amusement and pleasure at the discovery of alternative meanings. Humor draws our attention, which may increase memory for information presented with humor (the humor effect) and uses cognitive resources to successfully comprehend or produce. Having a sense of humor is associated with executive functioning, flexible thinking, creativity, insight, and time perspective.
